All posts tagged Call of Duty: Black Ops II

This year was an evolutionary, not revolutionary, one for console gaming. Both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are long in tooth, likely to be refreshed next year, and developers acknowledged it was tough to eke out improvements in graphics. The Wii U’s late-November release lacked “wow” factor, with only lukewarm reviews for its hardware and still-small stable of games.This was largely a year of the sequel: Nearly all the big games had a II or III or a 4 in its title. The results weren’t always good.

But if gaming in 2012 is remembered for anything, it will likely be for efforts by publishers to more deeply engage gamers in new and different ways. There was the emergence of smartphones and tablets as second screens via companion apps. There was also a proliferation of downloadable content to enhance gameplay and storytelling. Some chose to cast aside the traditional controller, hoping to turn the gamer into a human joystick. Absent a holiday sales boost, lackluster sales indicate the world may not be quite ready for that.

And 2012 was also about the knitting of social networking into the fabric of games, pulling niche communities together on company servers, eschewing Facebook, or at least relegating it to second-tier status.

With those themes in mind, here are Speakeasy’s Top 10 Games of 2012. Read the list after the jump. Read More »

David Petraeus may have stepped down as CIA director amid the scandal surrounding his extramarital affair last week, but he’s already been re-enlisted for active duty in one place—the dystopic near-future of “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2,” which was released on Midnight Tuesday to millions of eager gamers and fans of Activision’s iconic military shooter franchise.

The story for “Black Ops 2,” which was written by David S. Goyer and developer Treyarch’s game director Dave Anthony and advised by seasoned military thinkers like P.W. Singer, combines real-world events from the late eighties (one level has players run around with Manuel Noriega himself) with a possible future “proto-Cold War” set in 2025. Read More »

Around the time Trent Reznor began to win Grammys, the prolific musician behind the band Nine Inch Nails started to “become more comfortable” with the idea of thinking of himself as a composer instead of just a rock star. And after scoring two of David Fincher’s most recent films—”The Social Network” and the American version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”—Reznor has now returned to one of his first true loves: videogames.

When Activision and Treyarch announced this past July that Reznor was writing the theme song for the just-released Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the news was met with equal parts of curiosity and excitement. Wasn’t this the same guy, after all, that raged endlessly against corporate interests affecting artistic expression now working for the largest videogame publisher in the United States? And hadn’t he spent much of his career in Nine Inch Nails mocking the sort of “militainment” culture that Call of Duty itself perpetuates? On the eve of the game’s launch, Speakeasy caught up with Reznor to hear his thoughts about the game industry and what drew him to Call of Duty. Read More »

In less than ten years, Call of Duty has become one of the world’s most successful entertainment franchises—breaking previous sales records set by “Avatar” and “Harry Potter”—and turned its publisher Activision into the largest videogame company by revenue in the United States. Since the series’ relatively humble origins as a World War II-era first person first shooter, the games’ fiction has edged closer and closer to modern-day military conflict. The name of its popular trilogy that wound to a close last year, after all, was Modern Warfare. With Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision and developer Treyarch took the franchise’s dark underbelly of Cold War intrigue and covert operations into the future, posing troubling questions about the evolution of military technology and our control over it. With eager Call of Duty fans already lining up for the game’s midnight launch on Tuesday, Speakeasy spoke with political scientist P.W. Singer, who served as a military adviser for Black Ops 2, and Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia about adapting Call of Duty’s fiction for the near-future.

If you haven’t heard of the videogame-toy hybrid Skylanders already, chances are you’re not in grade school or the parent of a child who is. If you have kids around that age, then you’ve probably had to put up with them pleading to get more Skylanders toys. And with the recent release of Skylanders: Giants, this pleading will only get worse.

As a videogame, Skylanders works like this: In addition to the game disc, you receive a handful of cartoonish action figures (the Skylanders themselves) and a small plastic platform known as the “portal of power.” The portal lights up when plugged into the console or PC, and is basically as a stage for the Skylanders as you play the game. Whichever toy is placed on the portal becomes the player’s in-game avatar, and each challenge asks for a slightly different Skylander. Read More »

Hollywood tends to do poorly when it turns video games into movies, so why not get actors to do commercials for videogames instead?

Activision will debut a TV spot for developer Treyarch’s coming game Call of Duty: Black Ops II during Monday Night Football tonight on ESPN. The ad was directed by Guy Ritchie and stars Robert Downey Jr.

“Guess who brought a jet to a gun fight?” Downey declares in the spot.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.